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The crux of Franzen’s argument is summed up about halfway through his piece: “The Earth as we now know it resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy. We can dam every river and blight every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming. Or we can settle for a shorter life of higher quality, protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe.”

In particular, Franzen lashed out at Audubon for his belief that the organization has lost its way by preferencing the the fight against climate change over protecting birds. Audubon CEO David Yarnold’s excellent response is nicely encapsulated by his line that “our members can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Franzen also wants to give up on climate change because the problem is too big for any one person’s actions to have any effect: “The scale of greenhouse-gas emissions is so vast, the mechanisms by which these emissions affect the climate so nonlinear, and the effects so widely dispersed in time and space that no specific instance of harm could ever be traced back to my 0.0000001-per-cent contribution to emissions.”

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